The Glitter Of Green
by StevenQ
Summary: Ascendancy-verse. Six months after Ascendancy Tommy gets called to Reefside by Jason. The Dragon-coin, sent back to the past with Tommy's clone has been found.


**Name: **The Glitter Of Green  
**Chapter 1:** From The Depths  
**Disclaimer:** I own nothing, I am nothing. I am one with the gestalt. Sue him  
**Archives:** Sure, just let me know where  
**Summary:** A surprise call from Jason brings Tommy back to Angel Grove to reclaim his legacy.  
**Notes: **This is the first of two companion pieces to Ascendancy before the sequel kicks off. It takes place roughly six months post-Ascendancy, with the second story taking place about two weeks later, and which will be written once this one is completed. The companion pieces won't be quite as epic in scale as Ascendancy or it's sequel, but will provide backstory to events and enemies in the sequel.

* * *

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body  
- Andre Maurois

* * *

"Over here!" Bennet heard the call from one of the people on his team, and he stopped what he was doing to glance over in that direction. He was currently supervising an archeological dig on a small farmstead just outside of Angel Grove. While most people found the city's recent history with it's Power Rangers and numerous space-aliens interesting, for Bennet Marcos it was the history that no one remembered that drove and fascinated him, and Angel Grove had a history that went all the way back to colonial times. His class-mates and eventually his college-friends had all been about the here and now, but Bennet was all about the past.

It had inevitably lead to the conclusion by his disappointed friends that he didn't care about anything in the present. That was patently untrue, it was just that anyone could experience a thrill about something happening in the present. The discovery of some long forgotten piece of lore or knowledge, or even just a glimpse at how someone had lived, was a thrill only shared by other archeologists. The living, breathing human who experienced their own dreams and hopes and fears and mundane events was as important to him as the occasionally beautiful artwork that was discovered.

So it didn't take him more than a moment to put away the laptop he was using to make notes on the day's dig and to go join his fellows. The woman who had called him, Janine something, he could never remember, was definitely one of his better people. She had an almost instinctive grasp of patterns that was a boon to their business. She could find a fraction of something buried and be able to almost intuitively divine what she was looking for, and how to dig it out without damaging it. One thing that got lost in the all too rare media portrayals of what they did was that almost anything that they found was fragile, and needed to be carefully dug up.

So it was with some surprise when he joined her, only to find her wrenching at something she had half uncovered. He knelt down at the edge of the pit she was standing in, and shaded his eyes from the California sunlight so he could see. "Found something?"

"No," she responded, her voice dripping with sarcasm but without heat. "I'm just desperate to get you to take some daily exercise, and walking twenty feet over here qualifies." She looked up with a grin and he matched it. He was exceptionally organised, she was an intuitive free-thinker, and under any other circumstances, they probably would have hated each other. Here however, she recognised that someone as organised as him was essential, and that included asking rhetorical questions, and he recognised that indulging her sense of humor meant getting the best out of her. It was a strange system but it worked for them.

He waited for her to elaborate, and true to form she did. "I was tracking the outer wall of the farmhouse, when I spotted what looked like a proper burial mound, except it was far too small to have been for a person, and I doubt anyone in seventeenth century Angel Grove was burying their pets." She wiped her head with the back of her hand, then continued her work. "And I found a small case buried, thought I should dig it out. It's a sturdy sucker too."

She finally managed to work it loose from the hard earth, and lifted the small box like it was a trophy before setting it down on the lip of the pit, right next to where Bennet was standing. The box was ornate, and apparently made of clay. Bennet was surprised at that for a moment, before realising that a properly built clay box would last a lot longer than any other reasonable contemporary material. The metal of the day would have corroded, and even treated wood might have rotted. Clay on the other hand, as had been proven through the thousands of bits of pottery that had been recovered by archeologists over the centuries, could last a very long time.

Slipping on a pair of soft gloves to avoid damaging the find, Janine carefully unlatched the clay box and opened it, and both their eyes widened.

* * *

_Several weeks later_

* * *

The message had been short and to the point, and never had Tommy Oliver, PhD. been so annoyed at the fact that he had missed a phone call. He didn't question the message he got from Jason. As one of his oldest friends the understanding was simple. Jason wouldn't tell him to drop what he was doing and come pronto unless it was really important, and so Tommy had explained to the principal that he had a family emergency he had to deal with in Angel Grove, had turned his students over to the substitute, and had packed his jeep and started driving.

Angel Grove really wasn't well placed for him to be driving to from Reefside, and it would have been much easier if he'd flown. Despite that he preferred to drive. There was still some part of him that loved the feel of being behind the wheel, that had once propelled him to try and be a racer before Trini's accident had made him unable to risk himself like that for anything less than the latest Ranger Emergency. Her death had hit all of the original Rangers hard, and even if he hadn't been one of the first five, he did consider himself one of the originals, and knew the others felt the same way. For a long time Trini's death had been a unique event in Ranger history, and then Kendrix had died. Ranger deaths were thankfully few and far between, and Kendrix at least had been brought back, but the loss of Trini had shattered that aura of invincibility that had clung to the original teams. That sense that as long as they refused to bow down, as long as they refused to give up, then they might be beaten, but they'd always survive.

Trini, Kendrix, and then Conner, killed taking out a super-powered Mesogog in Reefside, now almost six months ago. He had come to terms with what had happened, mostly by his friends refusing to let him get despondent, but at times he still ached for what had happened. He put those thoughts out of his head as he drove. He had a tendency to think too much when he had been driving for hours, and especially as he was now driving at night. He'd left more or less directly after school, but it was still a good six or seven hours to Angel Grove, and the clock on his dashboard was just clicking past one in the morning when he passed the city limits of the town he had once called home.

Despite his almost legendary absent-mindedness as a teenager, he could have found the way to Jason's house with his eyes closed. He pulled up in-front of the house that he had taken over when his parents chose to retire to somewhere in the mid-west, and that he now shared with his wife. To his complete non-surprise, Jason had been standing on the porch of his house, bottle of water in hand and looking for all the world like he had just been waiting for him for a few seconds, and Tommy wondered what on earth was so important that his friend would stand out waiting for him this late at night.

The grin that appeared on his face though, was completely genuine as he hopped out of the car and strode over to Jason, who gave him a big smile in return and grabbed him in a hug.

"It's good to see you Tommy. Glad you could come," Jason didn't seem to be the least bit insincere, of course Tommy was fairly sure that Jason didn't even know how to lie except to protect his various secret identities.

"For you, always," Tommy said with conviction. "But I'm very curious what's so important I had to drop what I was doing and come down here."

Jason waited while Tommy grabbed his hastily packed bag, and followed Jason into his house. The former Gold Ranger moved with a silent grace that spoke both of years of martial arts, and a very strong desire not to wake his wife up if he didn't have to, as he lead Tommy into the den, and gestured to the couch.

"I didn't want to tell you over the phone, because," he shrugged and Tommy nodded. There were things they didn't talk about in public, their Ranger days were one of them. Like so many other people with secrets and almost without noticing, they'd evolved certain innocuous sounding code-phrases about their shared history, and any time one of the original Rangers started talking about 'the old days', Tommy immediately assumed they were talking about Ranger stuff.

Jason took out what looked like a news-paper clipping and passed it over to him. "I sort of keep track of local news, even though the Space Rangers are Angel Grove's official team now, and I pay special attention to any story that seems out of place. So when I saw that article, I needed to check it out."

Tommy meanwhile had been quickly scanning the clipping, which was talking about an archeological dig just outside of Angel Grove, and was half listening to Jason when he read something, and his heart seemed to skip a beat. His eyes snapped up to Jason who nodded and passed him a photo.

"I took that yesterday, had it developed and then called you."

Tommy looked at the picture of a display case in the Angel Grove historical museum, a museum dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of Angel Grove in a new millennium, but his entire being was focused on the picture. Sitting on a small red velvet stand, was an exquisite gold coin, engraved with a foot with three toes. It was a symbol he hadn't seen in years, even though he had modeled the Dino-Thunder emblem on it. It was the symbol of his very first Ranger Power.

Jason nodded as Tommy's eyes came up and met his again. "It's true bro, I've seen it myself. They've found your Dragon Coin."

tbc...


End file.
